Monthly Archives: July 2012

Early European Books

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Early European Books is a Proquest project in partnership with major European Libraries, such as the Royal Library of Copenhagen, the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze, and the Wellcome Library. Early European Books is issued as a series of annual collections, each offering access to the early printed books of one or more major libraries. These collections aim to form a seamless and increasingly comprehensive survey of printing in Europe to 1700.

All works printed in Europe before 1701, regardless of language, fall within the scope of the Early European Books project, together with all pre-1701 works in European languages printed further afield. Early European Books is largely concerned with non-Anglophone materials, and predominantly non-Anglophone collections have been made available for digital capture. The database includes a few titles of Avicenna, Ibn Zuhr and Abu al-Qasim al-Zaharawi, in Arabic, Latin translation or bilingual editions.

Early European Books offers full-colour, high-resolution (400 ppi) facsimile images scanned directly from the original printed sources. Each item in the collection is captured in its entirety, complete with its binding, edges, endpapers, blank pages, and any loose inserts, providing scholars with a wealth of information about the physical characteristics and provenance histories of the original artefacts.

Detailed descriptive bibliographic metadata accompanies each set of facsimile Document Images to support browsing and searching. Users of Early European Books are also provided with functionality that allows them to pinpoint particular images containing manuscript annotation and various kinds of non-textual printed matter including illustrations and maps.

Early European Books is accessible to McGill users, through our database portal.

Dīvān-i Kamāl al-Dīn Masʻud Khujandī & Dīvān-i Qāsim-i anwār

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In 1927 the Ismaili scholar Wladimir Ivanow purchased a number of Arabic, Persian and Hindustani (Urdu) manuscripts on behalf of Dr. Casey Wood of McGill University. The collection is currently housed in Rare Books and Special Collections. The Ivanow manuscripts are within the Blackerwood Collection and number around 200. There are many treasures to be found within this collection, the example here being one such. The image below is from the Dīvān-i Kamāl al-Dīn Masʻud Khujandī & Dīvān-i Qāsim-i anwār, BWLW63. The Dīvān-i Kamāl is the primary text of the codex while the Dīvān-i Qāsim-i anwār is written in the margins, a seemingly popular manner of transmitting texts. This manuscript is noteworthy because it was, according to the preface owned by Ulughbeg, the son of Timur (a.k.a. Tamerlane) founder of the Timurid Empire.

Ulughbeg

South and Southeast Asian Literature database trial

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McGill Library is currently trialling South and Southeast Asian Literature from Alexander Street Press, which is a constantly growing collection of fictions, short fictions, poems, interviews, and manuscript materials written in English by writers in South and Southeast Asia and their Diasporas.

The collection comprises literature written originally in English by writers who either were born in or identify themselves culturally with India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, the Maldives, Malaysia, Myanmar, Singapore, and Fiji. Because the South and Southeast Asian Diasporas are so widely cast, the collection also includes the work of writers living or working in Africa, the United Kingdom, North America, and the Caribbean. The collection will focus upon literature written during the late-colonial and postcolonial eras, but it will also include earlier work that is essential to scholarship in this area.

Check it out here, and let us know what you think!

Exhibition: جل ترى المعاني – Travel, you will see the meaning [of things]

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Hi friends! A general reminder that the exhibition: جل ترى المعاني – Travel, you will see the meaning [of things] is still on. The exhibition highlights some of the rare travel books of the McGill University Library collections.

The Muslim world has fascinated numerous travellers throughout history and has produced some of the most celebrated explorers the world has ever seen. Islamic travel and Muslim travellers encompass a wide-breadth of exploration, terrain and knowledge. In fact, the Arabic word for travel, riḥlah, can mean both the act of travelling as well as that of writing about travel. Strongly encouraged to travel, millions of Muslims perform the annual ḥajj (pilgrimage) to Mecca as one of the five pillars of Islam. The Prophet Muḥammad in a ḥadith noted, “seek knowledge even as far as China.”

On display are examples of the rare items held by McGill University and located in the Rare Books and Special Collections department in the McLennan Library. Each of these items offers a different aspect of travel from both the Western perspective of visiting the Muslim world as well as Muslims having visited the Christian world. The title of the exhibition comes from a Moroccan proverb that embodies the ideal of travelling and attaining knowledge.